> I'd wager that the current rasterising pipeline is more flexible than one based on raytracing - capable of generating a range of styles, not just photorealistic ones
Nope. I'd say the "raytracing pipeline" really does replace only the rasterization step, and once the triangle to draw is "found", you do whatever shading/lighting/fx/fragshader you want to draw it with? Wouldn't this be the most sensible approach?
Rasterization in lay-man's terms really is just "figure out which triangle, if any, is 'hit' at this pixel", so a historically much faster and very neat hack to avoid the tracing of a ray..
But you don't get cheap soft-shadowing / ambient occlusion / reflect-refract and you'd need to do occlusion culling seperately for current-gen "complex" scenes to avoid a drawcall for all kinds of hidden objects. That's where at some point raytracing as it becomes more feasible also becomes much more attractive. Potentially also reducing geometry-LODing headaches etc..
Nope. I'd say the "raytracing pipeline" really does replace only the rasterization step, and once the triangle to draw is "found", you do whatever shading/lighting/fx/fragshader you want to draw it with? Wouldn't this be the most sensible approach?
Rasterization in lay-man's terms really is just "figure out which triangle, if any, is 'hit' at this pixel", so a historically much faster and very neat hack to avoid the tracing of a ray..
But you don't get cheap soft-shadowing / ambient occlusion / reflect-refract and you'd need to do occlusion culling seperately for current-gen "complex" scenes to avoid a drawcall for all kinds of hidden objects. That's where at some point raytracing as it becomes more feasible also becomes much more attractive. Potentially also reducing geometry-LODing headaches etc..